Cisco looks set to take further advantage of the disgruntlement at VMware with a dedicated hypervisor for its own applications.

Dubbed NFVIS-for-UC (Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure Software for Unified Communications), the Linux-based offering provides end-to-end support across Cisco applications and hardware. The move would eliminate the need for VMware’s ESXi bare-metal hypervisor, which users previously relied on for Cisco Unified Communications (UC) applications.

The offering was teased last October as a lightweight VMware alternative, with the networking giant touting it as a means to simplify virtualization and collaboration workloads.

It’s marketed at organizations with between200 to 5,000 users, but can be used with deployments of any size, while also hawked as a “natural fit” for use in air-gapped or regulated environments. The hypervisor is set to hit general availability in Q1, with plans to extend support for Nutanix AHV (Acropolis Hypervisor) later this year.

A virtualization guide, which explains how to use the offering, dropped earlier this month, as spotted by The Register.

NFVIS-for-UC joins Cisco’s FlashStack into the fray

The launch of Cisco’s own hypervisor comes amid growing industry animosity around VMware following Broadcom's acquisition and the subsequent VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) revamp.

For Cisco, NFVIS-for-UC marks the second effort to de-risk customers from VMware, following the debut of FlashStack, a joint offering from Cisco, Nutanix, and Pure Storage.

Where NFVIS-for-UC focuses on collaboration-specific applications, FlashStack is a broader data center play whereby Cisco server lines – including the UCS X-Series, C-Series, and B-Series – are tied together with Pure Storage’s FlashArray and the Nutanix Cloud Platform to create a converged stack that aims to entice disgruntled VMware customers with a validated migration option.

Speaking with SDxCentral at the EMEA leg of Cisco’s Live event series, Danny McGinniss, VP for product management of compute, explained that the converged offering overcomes one of the biggest limitations with migrations: having large enough storage area network (SAN) environments.

“With everything that you're seeing with Broadcom, everybody's looking not just for an alternative, but a viable alternative, something that has a real enterprise company mindset to support the ecosystem around it,” the VP said.

But while Cisco and most of the wider market are gunning for VMware amid a time of tumult, McGinniss was mindful that change doesn’t happen overnight.

“VMware is going to be around for a very long time. It's not going anywhere,” McGinniss said. “As many customers who talk about moving, for the ones that actually move, it’s a very thoughtful, pragmatic process that needs to happen. It’s not like anybody just says, 'tomorrow let me just jump ship and start moving.' The economics have to make sense. The transition itself has to make sense, like what’s the TCO or the ROI associated with me making this migration, and then is the risk versus reward worth it?

"And then lastly, the support that I can get from the vendor or vendors in that stack. I think [Cisco] plus Nutanix has brought a lot of credibility into larger enterprises; us together is driving a lot of these bigger opportunities that we're coming across.”

The launch of Cisco’s hypervisor offering or the converged FlashStack likely won’t strike fear into Broadcom, with the vendor confident in the face of competition. The vendor's software arm helped drive it to record revenues in 2025, while more than 90% of its 10,000 largest customers are firmly on board with VCF.

The apparent stoicism of Broadcom's VCF platform persisted just last week, with its chief technologist promoting it to SDxCentral as a solution for customers grappling with the memory component crunch.